There was a flash of light in the vast space, and the silver-white spacecraft leaped out of the hyperspace and into the universe as if it was condensed out of the light.
"Navigation over."
Nolan's voice reminded them that they had arrived at their destination. Hao Ren immediately looked up from the dazzling data and looked at the image from the external monitor of the spacecraft. The spacecraft had arrived at the edge of a bright nebula, and the state of the nebula was obviously very strange.
It was a pale purple gas cloud structure, and the data showed that it was more than twelve light-years in size. The entire nebula was radial, and its core was brighter. Judging from the shape, it seemed to be a small part of a nebula that had been torn apart. The bright light may be the original matter that had failed to evolve into a star. In the relatively thin and dim area of the nebula, some bright light spots could be seen, which were smaller stars shining.
"The shape looks a bit strange …" Lily lay in front of the holographic projection and wagged her tail. "It looks like it has been distorted by a magnifying glass."
Hao Ren nodded. "It may be gravitational interference. There is probably a black hole or something in the sunken area."
They were talking about the strange shape of the nebula: the nebula was not regular, and one side of it was obviously "caved in". All the matter around it, including light, was tilting toward the caved point, which made the whole structure of the nebula look like a canvas being pulled and torn, or as if there was a hole in the universe, and the nebula was leaking into another space through the hole. If one looked closely, they would find that the entire pale purple nebula was affected by this' slanting point ', as if a huge gravitational source was slowly pulling it in.
At one end of the pale purple nebula, which was closer to the 'slanting point', there were obvious signs of fracture. All the matter in that area suddenly disappeared, leaving a clearly defined cut band, as if the originally ethereal nebula had been slashed by some invisible force, or some kind of optical phenomenon had blocked the view there.
"That's strange …" Lily mumbled to herself. She might look stupid, but she was the most educated girl in the team. She did not just watch the scene in front of her. "The distortion of the starlight can be explained by a black hole, but what about the nebula that suddenly broke off?"
"No, you can't even explain the skewed starlight." Hao Ren glanced at the data on the meter and suddenly frowned. "There's no black hole there."
"No black hole?" Lily's ears twitched. "Then why is the light skewed?"
"It has nothing to do with gravity," the MDT explained before Hao Ren could say anything. At the same time, it projected a set of holographic images showing the spatial structure of the lavender nebula. It was wrinkled like a cloth that was being pulled. "Space itself is skewed. The stars are only distorted in our line of sight, but they are still straight in their own space. This is a strange place. There is no interference from a strong gravitational source, but the curvature of space itself has changed. "
Y 'zaks muttered in a hoarse voice, "It must be the explosion of the deicidal war that tore apart the spatial structure here."
Hao Ren flew the spacecraft at sub-light speed towards the skewed point of the nebula. At the same time, he connected to the garage. Muru was waiting there. "Muru, I'll send the image to you. Do you think this is the Solenne Gateway?"
He sent the image of the skewed nebula to the guardian giant. The latter's voice came a few seconds later, with a sense of surprise. "This … looks like part of the galaxy where the Solenne Gateway is located. But how did it become like this?"
"We don't know. There's a spatial anomaly in those distorted places. Space itself is distorted and incompatible with the surrounding universe," Hao Ren explained. "Now we are heading towards the most distorted area. Do you know which celestial body the signal came from?"
Muru suppressed the doubts and uneasiness in his heart. At the same time, he searched his memory for familiar celestial structures in the severely distorted nebula. "Skewed point … Just a little further. Do you see this place that looks like it's cut off? There's a lonely light spot here. It's a star, and there should be a rocky planet around it. That planet is the fortress of the Solenne Gateway. Its name is Solenne. That's where the signal came from. "
Hao Ren nodded and let Nolan speed up towards the planet. At the same time, he opened the data link of the drone cluster and pulled up the surveillance record of a drone here a few days ago.
A few days ago, a drone had passed by this area and turned the camera towards the direction of the nebula in front of Hao Ren. But at that time, there was only nothingness. Sparse starlight from tens of thousands of light-years away dotted this desolate place.
Hao Ren looked up, but what he saw was a magnificent, crooked and strange lavender nebula.
The Gate of Solenne appeared out of nowhere, without any warning. It just appeared out of thin air in the universe. The question was, why did it appear out of nowhere?
Nolan quickly approached the skewed point, and soon the distance was so close that the external monitor could not see the full picture of the nebula. Hao Ren only saw that the spacecraft was approaching a star that was getting brighter and brighter. Almost touching the star, there was a clear 'fracture zone'. The fracture zone stretched out to both sides of the star with a momentum that almost pierced through the universe (at least visually).
The fracture zone was the boundary that Hao Ren saw when he observed the lavender nebula from afar. It was a place that looked like it was cut off by a knife. It neither glowed nor had any obvious color. But because the background of the universe was incompatible with the background of the nebula, and the starlight from other places was blocked by the fracture zone, it made the boundary very obvious.
"It feels like the Solenne Gateway was cut off from something bigger." Lily pointed to the fracture zone next to the star. "We are flying towards the edge of the knife!"
Nolan's holographic projection suddenly popped out of the air. She stared at Lily with her arms akimbo. "Don't talk about such a terrible topic. I'm the one flying over there. I'm looking at it from a first-person perspective!"
Hao Ren glanced at Nolan. As she spent more time on the spacecraft, the personality of this once cold and alienated 'mercenary' had become more and more like a normal person. But this change had nothing to do with the spacecraft. The most important thing was that Nolan had finally touched the 'truth'. Now, she didn't have to worry that everything in front of her would suddenly disappear like waking up from a dream, and she didn't have to worry that the people around her would suddenly become strangers in the blink of an eye. She lived in a truly credible new environment, so what she was releasing now was probably her true nature.
And just as Hao Ren's mind was thinking about these random things, Nolan's expression suddenly changed. Then the Petrachelys suddenly slowed down, and the onboard mainframe sounded an alarm at the same time. "Space-time anomaly, halt detection. Space-time anomaly, halt detection …"
Y 'lisabet immediately jumped to her feet. "What's going on? What's going on?"
"There's a space-time distortion in front." Nolan's image suddenly became faint. She was transferring more computing power to the onboard mainframe. "… There's a problem with the time flow at the skew point."
Y 'lisabet scratched her horns. "Time flow?"
The little demon did not seem to have learned such a profound lesson.
The holographic projection of the console showed an image of the celestial bodies within a certain range, and the planet called 'Solenne' was in the center of the image. It was marked in a striking red, and around Solenne, there were circles of red rings spreading out, and the color was fading. This was a vortex that represented the intensity of a phenomenon, and Solenne was in the center of this vortex.
"Time is distorted along with space, and Solenne is where the skew is the most severe." Nolan pointed at Solenne and explained quickly. "From here, the closer you are to Solenne, the slower time flows."
The scene suddenly became quiet. Hao Ren and the others looked at each other.
They knew that this place was strange, but they did not expect the strangest part to be the flow of time. This was different from any problem they had solved before.
"Approaching a black hole will also produce a similar time-dilation effect, or other forms of FTL navigation without space-time stabilization will also produce this phenomenon," Nolan said. She may not have had this knowledge before, but now that she had the database, she knew everything. "There is neither a black hole nor FTL movement here. The main reason for the change in the flow of time may be the skew of space … or some other deeper reason, such as the deicidal war blowing up the laws of the universe here."
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